For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting

WASHINGTON — In 2006, when Edward J. Snowden joined the thousands of computer virtuosos going to work for America’s spy agencies, there were no recent examples of insiders going public as dissidents. But as his doubts about his work for the Central Intelligence Agency and then for the National Security Agency grew, the Obama administration’s campaign against leaks served up one case after another of disillusioned employees refashioning themselves as heroic whistle-blowers.

Instead of merely opting out of surveillance work, Mr. Snowden embraced their example, delivering hundreds of highly classified N.S.A. documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. His act may have been a spectacular unintended consequence of the leak crackdown itself.

It may also have reflected his own considerable ambition, disguised by his early drifting. From Mr. Snowden’s friends and his own voluminous Web postings emerges a portrait of a talented young man who did not finish high school but bragged online that employers “fight over me.”

“Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history,” he wrote online at age 20. Mr. Snowden, who has taken refuge in Hong Kong, has studied Mandarin, was deeply interested in martial arts, claimed Buddhism as his religion and once mused that “China is definitely a good option career wise.”

After handing over the documents, he told The Guardian of his admiration for both Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is now on trial for providing 700,000 confidential documents to WikiLeaks, and Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

“Manning was a classic whistle-blower,” Mr. Snowden, 29, said of Private Manning, 25. “He was inspired by the public good.”

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Edward J. Snowden, who leaked information about government surveillance, has supporters in Hong Kong, where he has taken refuge.CreditKin Cheung/Associated Press

For role models, Mr. Snowden, an introspective man who spent his formative years in the rebellious technogeek counterculture, could look not only to the young Army private, lionized by a global following, but also to dissenters at his own agencies.

From the N.S.A., Mr. Snowden’s most recent employer, there was Thomas A. Drake, who since his 2010 leak prosecution has denounced the agency as Big Brother on the lecture circuit. From the C.I.A., Mr. Snowden’s previous employer, there was John Kiriakou, who rallied supporters with his assertion that his prison term for leaking was payback for speaking out about waterboarding.

If Mr. Snowden wished to draw similar attention, he has succeeded. Along with denunciations in Congress as a traitor and a manhunt by the F.B.I., he has already won public acclaim from a diverse group of sympathizers, from the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore to the right-wing television host Glenn Beck.

His disclosures have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.

“There were lots of discussions at N.S.A. and in the intelligence community in general about the acculturation process,” said Joel F. Brenner, a former inspector general of the agency. “They were aware that they were bringing in young people who had to adjust to the culture — and who would change the culture.”

Mr. Brenner said that with such a buildup after the Sept. 11 attacks, “you’re going to have some sloppiness and some mistakes.” It is remarkable, he said, that “disloyalty” of Mr. Snowden’s variety is so rare.

Mr. Snowden’s fascination with computer technology began in high school in Anne Arundel County, Md., near Baltimore, and became a focus of his life after he dropped out in his sophomore year. He socialized with a tight circle of people who were enthralled by the Internet and Japanese anime culture.

“He was a geek like the rest of us,” said one member of the group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid a flood of media inquiries. “We played video games, watched anime. It was before geek was cool.”

Mr. Snowden lived with his mother, Elizabeth, a court administrator, who was divorced in 2001 from his father, Lonnie Snowden, a Coast Guard officer.

Mr. Snowden and his friends built personal computers from parts ordered over the Internet. They created a Web site called Ryuhana Press, which the former friend was amused to see reported in recent days as a real business. “It was the name of our club,” he said.

His friends persuaded “Edowaado,” as Mr. Snowden called himself, using the Japanese version of “Edward,” to get his high school equivalency diploma. “I don’t think he even studied. He just showed up and passed the G.E.D.,” the friend said.

In 2001, at 17, Mr. Snowden adopted an online persona he called “The One True Hooha” or just “Hooha” at the Web site Ars Technica, a forum for gamers, hackers and hardware tinkerers. His online chatter over the next two years revolved around role-playing video games like Tekken, Final Fantasy, Max Payne and Team Fortress Classic. He discussed his interest in martial arts and his disdain for formal education. He fitfully took classes at Anne Arundel Community College but never earned a degree.

Toward the end of 2003, Mr. Snowden wrote that he was joining the Army, listing Buddhism as his religion (“agnostic is strangely absent,” he noted parenthetically about the military recruitment form). He tried to define a still-evolving belief system. “I feel that religion, adopted purely, is ultimately representative of blindly making someone else’s beliefs your own.”

Mr. Snowden told The Guardian that he signed up for an Army Reserve Special Forces training program to “fight to help free people from oppression” in Iraq. But he said he broke his legs in a training accident and was discharged four months later.

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A school yearbook photo reflects attendance that did not end with a diploma.CreditAnne Arundel County Public Schools

He returned to Maryland and found a job as a security guard at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, which has a close relationship with the N.S.A., a 15-mile drive away.

In mid-2006, Mr. Snowden landed an information technology job at the C.I.A. Despite his lack of formal credentials, he secured a top-secret clearance and a coveted posting under State Department cover in Geneva. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. I don’t even have a high school diploma,” he wrote on Ars Technica in May 2006. But he had no trouble getting work because he was a computer wizard, he said.

In August that year he wrote about a possible path in government service, perhaps involving China. “I’ve already got a basic understanding of Mandarin and the culture, but it just doesn’t seem like as much ‘fun’ as some of the other places,” he wrote.

Mavanee Anderson befriended Mr. Snowden in Geneva, where both had high security clearances and spoke often about their jobs. In an article published Wednesday in The Chattanooga Times Free Press of Tennessee, Ms. Anderson said he spoke of the “stresses and burdens” of his work as a network security specialist and described him as thoughtful and at times brooding.

She said that during the period they worked close to each other, from 2007 through the beginning of 2009, Mr. Snowden “was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts.”

“I think anyone smart enough to be involved in the type of work he does, who is privy to the type of information to which he was privy, will have at least moments like these,” she wrote. “And at some point during that time he left the C.I.A.”

She said that while she understood Mr. Snowden’s motivations for exposing government secrets, she wished he had dealt with his concerns in a different way. “I would have told Ed that he didn’t have to take this burden on himself,” she wrote.

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Daniel Ellsberg and Edward J. Snowden maintain that they performed a public service even as others label them traitors. Villains or saints, leakers often cast their actions as a kind of moral crusade.

In 2009, Mr. Snowden joined the National Security Agency as a contract employee at a military facility in Japan. He told The Guardian he was disappointed that President Obama “advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.”

“I got hardened,” he said.

In 2010, he returned to Ars Technica after a long absence. His new preoccupation was political, not technical. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types,” he wrote. “Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop, or was it an relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?”

In March last year, Mr. Snowden donated $250 to the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, a libertarian, giving an address in Columbia, Md., and naming Dell as his employer. (A Dell spokesman would not confirm his employment.)

The next month he moved to Hawaii, according to a Twitter post from his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who refers to him as “E” and her “man of mystery.” She joined him in Hawaii last June, taking up pole-dancing and acrobatics. Neighbors described the couple as aloof but not unfriendly.

“There was nothing strange, nothing like that,” said Dr. Angel Cunanan, their next-door neighbor in Waipahu. “He said he was a contractor in the military.”

He asked for a medical leave in May to get treatment for epilepsy. On May 20, he left for Hong Kong, carrying four computers, according to The Guardian, and digital copies of the secret documents. On Monday, Booz Allen fired Mr. Snowden, calling his claims to have leaked classified information “shocking.”

The Justice Department is considering an array of charges against Mr. Snowden. For his part, Mr. Snowden told The South China Morning Post last week, “My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.”